1. Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate generally to information retrieval and, more particularly, to the providing of additional information in regard to a search result.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of the search engine is to provide links to high quality, relevant results (e.g., web pages) to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages. Web pages that contain the user's search terms are identified as search results.
Oftentimes, the search results include three pieces of information, such as a title, a snippet, and a link. The title identifies the corresponding web page. The snippet includes a small portion of the web page that often contains one or more of the search terms of the search query. Typically, the snippet includes no more than a sentence worth of text and might include one or more partial sentences. The link includes the address of the web page.
Users often use the snippets in determining which search result(s) to select. Because of the short length of the snippet, however, the snippet may not provide enough information for a user to make a meaningful decision regarding which search result(s) to select.